


The Big Band Period

by august_the_real



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:36:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3111455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_the_real/pseuds/august_the_real
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is the stupidest thing she has ever done".<br/>Set just after Take Out the Trash Day, so everything up to there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Big Band Period

Title: The Big Band Period  
author: august  
email: mrsrosiebojangles@gmail.com

 

She'd tumbled down hallways before, with men she'd known for hours but it had always been about laughter and alcohol and falling down. But that was years, and so much more, away from the man who was leaning against the elevator wall, watching her in silence. Her heels echo through the empty hallway and she keeps turning around to make sure he is still there. 

This is the stupidest thing she has ever done, she thinks, but then his hand is on the back of her neck as she unlocks her door. 

He had been staring at her shoulders and back all night - longer than that, if she let herself think about it.   
As they waited for a taxi, he had drawn his finger across her collarbone.   
"Split a cab?" She had asked, watching his feet.   
"Because we live so close." He said, eyebrows raised.   
"Then come home with me." 

He hadn't answered, but when the taxi had come, he held her wrist, pulling her back and getting in first. 

It is the stupidest thing she has ever done, but she lets him close her door behind them. 

*

There are plenty of ways she is used to waking up but none of them include Toby trying to tie his tie in her bedroom. 

"Trouble?" She is smiling, though she supposed he had no way of knowing that.   
"I think I'm still drunk, " he says, the words clearing his throat. She laughs and he does, a little, and there are so many ways this could have gone. 

"Come here." She sits up, a little.   
"You know, I've done this one or two times before, CJ." He moves to her anyway, crouching in front of her. He is quiet, silent, as her hands move in the almost dark around his neck. 

There is his breath on her forearm. 

"You know, you don't have to go." She smoothes her hand down the front of his shirt.   
"This isn't one of those-"  
"-I know." She tries to pull a sheet around her.   
"Because it's not that... you know." He stands, flattening down his trousers.   
"Yeah."   
"I need to get clean clothes. Also, about a million pages on Wid-Mest dairy farmers."   
"You've got that today?"   
"Yep." He picks up a blanket off the floor, and lays it on the end of her bed. 

"Toby?" She reaches to catch his hand, but misses.   
"Yeah?"   
"We're good."   
"Yeah?" She closes her eyes at his question.   
"Yeah. I'll see you in a couple hours." 

After a moment, he crosses the room. 

"Can I just say, " he begins, turning back, "that this, right now ... your back is about the most perfect thing I've seen."   
"Toby."   
"Yeah," he agrees, and she imagines him blinking long, trying to clear his vision. She sees him turn and start and turn again. "I know." 

 

Moments after she hears the front door close behind him, she gets out of bed and closes her window.   
Her toes are cold. 

*

She's standing outside her building, her mind filled with Sinatra tunes as she waits for her driver. She hadn't slept much after Toby had left, she'd started to read some briefs but had gotten sidetracked by a Sinatra CD and her ceiling, until her wake-up call rang. 

Occasionally, in the midst of her mental debates over the merits of Sinatra's Gershwin/Berlin period, she realises her thighs ache and smiles at the thought of her night. 

Mostly. 

Mostly, she thinks, as she waves to her driver and gets in the car, although unmitigated thoughts of Toby throw her a little; there's a lot of anger tied up in the thought of his hands. She's still not sure whether she's done the stupidest thing of her life, but there are messages waiting for her on her phone, and she finds herself humming "Night and Day" as she begins to dial. 

He'd been dropping by her office, on his way out of the building. It had started around the time of the sex education report, where she had watched him play with the yogurt container on her table and pretended not to understand his question. 

Sometimes, he would set his briefcase down and go through the next day's briefing. She got the feeling that he had wanted to say more, but he picked up his coat and case and left without saying good-bye. 

It took her four nights of this for her to realise that he was building up to an apology. It's the Toby she has known for years - he'll push, a little, and retreat. He has the shortest temper of anyone she's known, a contempt for people and once, in New York, she'd seen him put his fist through a car window. She forgets, now, why. 

But he also defends Julia Child and there are flecks of kindness in his sometimes cruelty. He had made her look like an idiot in front of the press and that was a vision crushing thing that wasn't going to go away, but he had also brought her a paper bag filled with watermelon candy the day the Lydell's went home. 

 

"We're here, CJ. Have a good day."   
"Thanks Heather." She smiles and steps out of the car. She pauses a moment, at the door, and looks back inside. "Sinatra. Gershwin period, or big band?"   
"Big band." Heather says. "Gershwin talks too much." 

*

"Leo's office, ten minutes," Carol says, handing her a file. 

One day, she is determined to get to her office before her assistant; she is becoming increasingly steadfast in her belief that someone simply throws a blanket over Carol at the end of the day. 

 

The thing of it is, she'd started kissing Danny a few weeks back. Not for a while now, not since she sent the Lydells home, but she had, and they had, and there is no use pretending that that wasn't something. 

Last night, when Toby had come to her office, it had been late. At about 10:30 pm, when she was starting to read papers for a conference planned three days away, she realised that she was waiting for him. At about 11:00 pm, she stood up, feeling like an idiot high school kid instead of the White House Press Secretary. There were so many things wrong with this situation, she didn't even want to start listing them. 

Number One. It was Toby. 

"Hey." He'd looked tired, she thought, and old.   
"Hey." She'd tried not to look up, to look at him, although that failed the minute he set down his coat.   
"You okay?" He stood in front of her desk, head slightly crooked.   
"Yeah, you know, you're interrupting my busy schedule of jamming things into my briefcase." She wasn't sure why she was mad, but she was doing a pretty good job of jamming. 

"I got held up with this stupid cotton thing, I'm sorry-". 

They both looked up at the same time. 

"I have no idea why I'm apologising to you," he said, laughing a little, and her hand seemed to be caught on the clasp of her case. It was cold, and small, and most definitely shut, but better her concentration be on a cold, small, inanimate object that what Toby Ziegler was saying to her. "I also have no idea why I'm laughing." 

In a breath of bravery, or something else, there were these words: "Let's get out of here, Toby. Let's go and drink." 

"Yeah," he said, and although she didn't want to notice, he was dragging his eyes away from her fish. 

*

In the bar, with Toby, she'd told him that she had wanted to leak the Lydell story. She said it from behind her beer, playing with the pretzels on the table and half expecting him to walk out of there. 

He waited until she made eye contact with him. "Why did you do that, CJ?" 

She's mad at herself about it, of course. Mad that she let Danny draw the line on her professionalism, mad that she let Toby call her on it. Mad that she was kissing people who didn't trust her to do her job, but oh god, was that a thought for later. 

And mad at herself, of course, for even considering not playing the team game.   
All of this had come out as, "Forget about it, Toby." 

"Forget that you tried to leak a story to a member of the press?"   
"It wasn't like-"  
"-then what was it like? Exactly?" 

 

Number Two: CJ was not a masochist. 

He's a hard man to be friends with, and whatever the hell she was about to do in this bar was going to be about twenty times harder. 

"You were right," she says, simply.   
"Not about that. You were going to use Danny to make yourself feel better. That's not at all about me being right, CJ. That's about you, and Danny." 

She picks up her drink, he watches her pick up her drink. She watches him. 

"What's going on here?" He says, not suddenly.   
"I thought..." She stops, shakes her head and then makes herself continue. "I thought I might ask you the same question." 

And there was silence, real silence, that didn't hold any promise of an end. And she thought, then, that if he couldn't do this, break this, it would be- 

"I've been thinking about how to say it. And I couldn't. So I didn't."   
There is urgency, and tumbling, as she speaks. "How long?"   
"How long?"   
"How long have you been thinking about it?"   
"You don't want to know, CJ."   
"You have no idea." 

"What, you two are having CJ and Toby time now?" A chair is pulled up to the table, and Josh sits down, enamored by his joke.   
"Yes." Toby says, staring straight at her and she has to look away, look at Josh.   
"You're not serious, right? Cause Mandy and Sam are about to walk in."   
"I'm always serious, Josh, especially when it means I have to spend time with Mandy outside of the office." 

Josh laughs and claps his back. She can't help but smile, and Toby sees that, and that something is there again. And she sits back and drinks, because these are her friends, this is who she is. 

And in the early Washington morning, on a street corner outside a bar, she invites him home. 

* 

"CJ? Leo's office in two minutes." Carol hollers, for the second time. 

She has the sneaking suspicion that Carol has been taking voice projection lessons as a direct way to avoid actual contact with her. She discussed the theory with Josh, who agreed that Donna had seemed to be staring at him more intently of late, lending weight to the mind control theory. Sam had once again gloated about Cathy-the-magnificent. 

She felt jipped. 

He doesn't look up when she walks into Leo's office, and she smiles silently at that. He is, however, taking more than a passing interest in her drinking Evian and that is a small thing to turn over as she begins taking notes. 

Forty-seven minutes later, she follows him out of the Oval Office, still writing notes from the meeting. She almost walks into him several times, and he waits for her to finish writing before speaking. 

"Call Helen and make sure she runs with this story, CJ. Bring her in for a meeting with the President, if you need to."   
"Yup."   
"Also, be careful with Barry's questions this afternoon. He's on his way out and he's gonna want a swan song."   
"Well, let's not give him one," she says, stopping outside her office.   
"Good." 

She's about to turn for her office, when he says, "CJ?"   
She looks up from her file for the first time. "Yeah?"   
"Hi." 

It's not quite a smile on his face, but it makes her want to. "Hi." 

And there's a second there, and she watches him drag it across his face before the moment breaks. 

"I've got this milk thing," he begins.   
"Go."   
"Yeah?"   
"Go." 

*

He had shut her apartment door behind them, and there they were, two forty-somethings in an under-furnished Washington apartment. And he had looked around, and up, and at her. 

There had been hands, and pillows, and it had been a while but he gripped her shoulders and touched her ribs. And this was slow and all sliding belts off and lifting up shirts. And there was coffee, and opening windows, and a kiss on the back. 

*

"Hey."   
"Hey." She puts down her papers and looks at him over her glasses. "How'd the milk thing go?"   
He shrugs. "I can now add the Midwest to the places I can never safely visit."   
"Toby." She tried not to smile.   
"Yeah." He brushes his hand over his face.   
"That's getting to be some list."   
"Lucky I don't like to travel." 

He falls into a chair, but he does it smiling as he leans his head back and closes his eyes. 

"Eaten yet?" he says, after a moment, eyes still closed.   
"Yeah, Donna made rounds a couple hours ago." 

There is a kind of reply, a grunt maybe, and after a while she picks up her papers again. It felt like pantomime, she was forty years old and pretending to read papers as she sat across the room from a man who may or may not be asleep. 

The knock at the door didn't interrupt anything. "Toby? Ah, excuse me, Sir?"   
He doesn't bother to lift up his head, but sighs loudly. She laughs at his dramatics. "Yes, Ginger?" 

The thing with Sinatra, she supposed as she watched Ginger cloud Toby with papers and questions, was that he wasn't a particularly good singer. He certainly wouldn't have been a Democrat and although she liked to consider herself open-minded, she was pretty sure the one thing she couldn't sleep with was a Republican. 

So there's this careful thing they have, she and Toby. And she watches him finally open his eyes, like he expects Ginger to disappear, and grimaces when she doesn't. 

He had kissed the back of her shoulder when she had stretched to open a window last night. There was refracted kindness, that could shatter, but she would have to trust it, for the moment, not to.


End file.
